Geľo listens to the sound of the snowstorm crashing into the icy igloo’s thick walls. His brain is swamped by a wave of helplessness and panic. But he soon recovers. If Geľo’s boys, the Slovaks of Junja, are holed up, then so are the mercenaries working for the Junjans. They are even more paralysed, since they’ve been recruited from all over the world and can’t handle bad weather as well as the Slovaks of Junja, who have been living here for several generations. The storms put the mercenaries out of action, and the Slovak guerrillas at least have a bit of time to rest. Sometimes that rest time drags on unbearably.
Geľo turns over again. He gives his hatred free rein. He allows it to plot a dastardly plan. He wonders how to surprise the Junjans and disturb their hibernation. He is depressed by the truce enforced by the long polar night and by the blizzard. He amuses himself for a while by thinking how to punish the mercenaries’ leader, Tökörnn Mäodna, when his men capture him. But for foreign mercenaries from all corners of the world, Ćmirçăpoļ, the capital of the former Junjan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (known today as the Junjan Khanate), would have fallen into Slovak hands a long time ago. Junjans are poor fighters: lazy and cowardly. But they pay foreigners to do it for them. People like Tökörnn Mäodna. Who knows if that’s his real name? Who knows what wind blew him here? He’s cruel. He spares neither women nor children.
The other men of Geľo’s group are also turning feverishly in their furs. They unconsciously touch the triggers of their automatic weapons, mostly of Czech manufacture, as if they were sensitive spots on the bodies of their women or girlfriends. They’re dreaming of freedom.
Frolo Sirovec-Molnár is smiling in his sleep. He must surely be with his young wife whom he had to leave in the taiga with the nomadic reindeer herders, just as the other men had to. The Junjans and their mercenaries won’t find them there. They’re safe.
The nomads are Slovaks, too. With thousands of head of reindeer they wander to and fro over the tundra like the biblical Moses in his desert. But, unlike Moses, they have no fixed goal. For their treks they use lightning-fast sledges with sails. They follow the reindeer and appear now here, now there. They like to make extra money gathering a special kind of lichen that the coastal trading posts buy to resell round the world for use in the perfume industry. The nomads are meeker than coastal Slovaks like Geľo and his friends. But they hate the Junjans, too. They are no warriors: they do what they can to help the guerrillas by taking care of their families and of secret stores of supplies hidden in the tundra.
Geľo thinks of his wife Elena. She is with the rich herder Kresan, a relative of theirs. Geľo’s brother Martin married into the Kresan family. As well as his wife Elena, Geľo has left his five children and his crippled father with the Kresans. He took only his oldest son with him. Two other brothers of Geľo, Samo and Adam, have also come to join the fight against the Slovaks’ enemies.
Adam became a sniper and he fell — from the roof of a twelve-storey building in Űŕģüllpoļ, when Tökörnn Mäodna’s mercenaries flushed him out. He preferred to jump rather than fall into the hands of cruel adventurers from every corner of the world. He left behind a pregnant wife, Zuzana; Geľo’s wife took care of her. After final victory, Geľo will have to take care of her, too, and inherit her from his brother as his wife, and the newborn son or daughter will be his child inherited from his brother. This is the Junjan Slovak custom, for the sea or tundra often claims a good man, the head of a family.
Geľo quite looks forward to it. Particularly to honouring tradition, which animates him even more than the actual instinct to reproduce.
Thinking of Zuzana means that Geľo wakes up with an erection. When he and Sirovec-Molnár were taken on an aeroplane to the unknown world, to Prague, for negotiations with military bigwigs, they gave him a gift for her. It was a small flask with a yellowish liquid. Perfume. He believes that one day he’ll have a chance to give it to her. He has something for Elena, too.
Geľo is thirsty. He clicks his dry tongue, but it doesn’t help. He is reluctant, however, to climb out of his furry den and drink warmed-up water from the teapot. It’s cold in the igloo and warm under the skin of a young reindeer. In his sleep he unwittingly stuck his foot out: it has turned violet and lost all feeling. He pulls it in and quickly massages it against the other foot.
The magic mushrooms that the hunters gather in spring from under the snow make them sleep well and long. You dream colourful dreams about travel in time and space. And even after waking up, the world is somehow more colourful for a while.
“Why aren’t you asleep, Dad?” asks his son, Jurko.
“I can’t,” says Geľo.
“The blizzard’s going on for a long time,” says Jurko.
“True,” says Geľo.
“I wonder if it blows on Tökörnn Mäodna as it does on us,” says Jurko.
When he hears the name of the Junjan mercenaries’ leader spoken, Geľo frowns.
“Don’t babble so much, son,” he warns him. “You’ve got an old man’s mind.”
“I just meant…” Jurko apologizes.
“I’m the leader,” Geľo says firmly. “If I say we’ll sleep, then we’ll sleep. Until I change my mind. If you don’t like it, you can take the dogs and go back to the tundra, to your mother and grandpa.”
“I just meant…” Jurko becomes afraid.
“And quiet, or you’ll wake up the men!” Geľo says sternly. “Who knows when we’ll next get so much sleep? We must stock up on sleep.”
The boy is quiet.
Geľo even feels sorry for him. On the other hand, he wouldn’t want a babbler for a son. “When the storm’s over, we’ll go hunting. Just you and me,” he says to make him feel better.
He lies for a while and thinks about his next steps. Finally, he climbs out from the furry bed with a sigh and, as he is, in his sealskin underpants, he gets up for a drink of warm water.
Through the howling blizzard he catches the sound of cautious footsteps and heavy breathing.
Geľo freezes. Could it be Junjan mercenaries? They’ve never yet dared to come close, or in the polar night. Geľo reaches for his gun and quietly, so as not to wake anyone in the ice house, he pulls back the bolt.
He looks at Jurko. In the oil lamp’s feeble light he sees that the boy has also got up and is standing, his gun ready, by the other side of the entrance. Geľo smiles at him reassuringly. Then he takes a deep breath and opens the first leather curtain. The cold wakes him fully. He pushes through the second curtain and now he is separated from the blizzard just by the third leather curtain. Jurko keeps his one pace behind him.
Geľo crosses himself and steps out of the igloo. The terrible cold momentarily freezes all his body’s muscles, but suddenly a massive dark object hurls itself at him with a ferocious roar and a stench of rotting fish. Geľo fires blindly and the corner of his eye notes flashes from Jurko’s gun. Several exploding dumdum bullets enter the enemy’s body and rip off bits of tissue. The intruder howls and tries to flee, but the bullets have done their lethal job. His movements get slower and slower, his giant paws slowly try to ward off inevitable death; he finally stiffens.
Geľo looks closer at the polar bear he’s killed.
“Why did he come so close?” he wonders aloud.
Somewhere out in the ice a crack must have opened, he thinks. Could spring have come so soon?
The shots wake the men from Geľo’s guerrilla group. They’ve all come out with their weapons, ready to fight.
“Nice work,” says Sirovec-Molnár, poking his gun in the white fur.
”I thought it was Mäodna’s people,” Geľo explains, as if apologizing for the noisy awakening.